Born out of Redmond Startup Weekend, MySearchKick is now one month old :). I have been talking to bunch of people in and around Seattle area and feedback is very positive. They all like it, love it and eager to try is out as soon as its available. But I feel I have not done a good job of explaining MySearchKick grand vision properly. I have noticed that people get hooked up only on the examples and scenarios that I give and anything beyond that is hard to imagine. So I will make another attempt to explain 'What is MySearchKick ?'.
First let me tell you what MySearchKick is NOT. Its not an another search engine and its not about search results relevance and reordering. Its not about mining your search history and behavior and its definitely not about spamming you or tricking you by any means. Privacy is of utmost importance to MySearchKick and we empower end-user to be in full control of what they want out of MySearchKick. You get only what you choose to get, period.
Search has become part of our life style today. We all use 'bing' (read your favorite search engine) as our gateway for most of our online and offline activities. It could be finding next yoga class, nice place to dine, travel to some exotic place, buy digital gadgets, send flowers to friends and families, look for sightseeing places, get local businesses & services, do online shopping, search for news, blogs, mingle with friends and (add your activities here).
Search engines are more and more becoming decision engines where they give you multiple relevant options to choose from without information overload. As an example if you search for 'Car Rental' you will get results from enterprise.com, avis.com, hertz.com, dollar.com, cityrentacar.com, alamo.com and similar other relevant results. Question I ask after seeing these results is 'How should I decide which one to go with? or more generically how do people decide that they want to go with avis.com and not hertz.com?'. Moreoever, these results are same and are in same order for all users. So in back of users' mind there are some other factors which guide them to choose 1 out of set of N results.
These 'other factors' are where MySearchKick comes into play. MySearchKick goal is to augment your individual search result with information that matters to you to help you make a selection.
One of these 'other factors' could be your membership cards. As an student you might have 'Student Advantage Card', as a Microsoft employee you might have 'Microsoft Prime Card', as a AAA member you might have 'AAA Card' or you might even love to use 'American Express' credit card often than others. And beauty is that some of the car rental businesses you got as a search result do offer 'discounts' on your memberships. Avis.com gives 'discount' on Microsoft-Prime, Hertz.com gives 'discount' on AAA, dollar.com gives 'bonus-points' on AMEX and NationalCar.com gives 'discount' on StudentAdvantage card and so on.
MySearchKick actually highlights 'this association information' in search results inline so that you are well aware of how are you connected to that search result and whats the value of that relationship.
Membership cards and associated discounts is just one example. You configure your MySearchKick account by telling us what cards you have and no other information like card-number etc and we highlight and give more details on search result by looking it back in thousands of businesses which already have partnership with your membership cards. Ofcourse if you can memorize all thousands of businesses supported by your card and keep up with changes then you are superman, for human beings, lets put technology to work for us, we already have enough to worry about in this economy.
If you are still with me so far then lets pop up one level and restate meta concept of MySearchKick: "Find and highlight relationship and its value between you and your search result, non-intrusively." Let your imagination fly as high as it can and think where-ever you can benefit from
MySearchKick.
